The worldwide packet data communication network now commonly referred to as the “Internet” has experienced extraordinary growth and acceptance. The Internet provides access to hundreds of millions of electronic documents, making it the largest single source of information in the world. As used herein, the term “electronic document” refers to any type of data or information in electronic form. Examples of electronic documents include, without limitation, text documents and web pages. In addition to providing access to vast amounts of information, the Internet provides a medium for a plethora of exciting and useful services such as electronic mail, user-to-user chat services and even the ability to place conventional telephone calls, sometimes referred to generally as “voice over IP.”
Arguably one of the most important services provided by the Internet medium is electronic commerce or “ecommerce.” Ecommerce refers to electronic transactions conducted over the Internet. The Internet allows customers to purchase a wide variety of products and services directly from merchants. Many merchant web sites and shopping portals sport sophisticated user interfaces that greatly simplify locating and purchasing products and services for customers at a reduced cost to consumers. For example, some shopping portals provide a comparative shopping feature that allows customers to compare prices and terms offered by different merchants for the same or comparable products.
Customers have conventionally used personal computers to complete ecommerce transactions. The advent of small, mobile devices, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and mobile telephones, allow users greater flexibility in conducting ecommerce transactions. Using mobile devices, customers can shop at multiple merchants and make purchases. Mobile devices with wireless Internet connections transform the concept of wireless computing and arguably greatly increase the value and usefulness of mobile devices. Customers can now view web pages from merchant sites and make purchases from any location, so long as they can establish a wireless connection to the Internet. The geographical regions available to wireless Internet customers continues to expand as wireless infrastructure grows.
There are several problems with processing ecommerce transactions over the Internet using mobile devices. First, it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, for mobile devices to process standard web pages because of processing limitations inherent in mobile devices. The relatively small screens and limited processing resources in mobile devices greatly inhibit or completely prevent the display of conventional web pages. For example, most cellular telephones necessarily have relatively small displays because of their small physical size. Second, by PC standards, mobile devices generally have fairly crude Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). This makes specifying complete user information, such as billing and shipping information, as well as product information from mobile devices difficult and tedious. Third, providing web pages to mobile devices is generally significantly slower than to personal computers because of bandwidth limitations in wireless communications networks. These problems are exacerbated with web pages that are rich in graphics. The result is that it is generally very difficult, if not impossible, to conduct ecommerce over the Internet with mobile devices using conventional web pages, especially over wireless communications links.
One solution to this problem is to generate special web pages for mobile devices that contain less “content” than conventional web pages. These pages generally contain only a subset of the text contained in conventional web pages and little or no graphical information. Despite the attractiveness of this solution, it has several significant drawbacks. First, the special web pages must be generated, which can require substantial computational and storage resources and place additional burdens on merchants. Moreover, the content of some web pages changes very frequently, which increases the frequency at which the corresponding special web pages must be re-generated. Generating special web pages “on-the-fly” can consume a significant amount of computational resources and increase the amount of time required to provide the special web pages to customers' mobile devices. Furthermore, web pages have to be customized for different mobile devices since mobile devices do not necessarily use the same interface standard.
Second, merchant web sites must know to provide the special web pages instead of the full web pages, which requires that merchant web sites know when a web page request originates from a mobile device. This may require mobile devices to access merchant sites through a special portal or a proxy server.
Based upon the increasing need for customers to conduct ecommerce transactions over the Internet and the limitations in prior approaches, an approach for processing electronic orders that does not suffer from limitations in prior approaches is highly desirable. Further, based upon the particular limitations and problems associated with conducting ecommerce transactions over the Internet using mobile devices with wireless connections to the Internet, there is a particular need for an approach for processing ecommerce transactions over the Internet from mobile devices with wireless connections to the Internet that does not suffer from the problems appurtenant to conventional approaches.